How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[kevinkin]

1 hour ago, womble said:

think that's where the geneticists would disagree. The gene pool won't hardly have a ripple in it, given the timescales involved. All that conditioning leaves marks on psyches, not DNA, not in centuries.

I agree. The reproductive rate of humans does not result in a rapid evolution of behavior or even physical characteristics. Plus all it takes is a small comingling between "gene pools" too produce an averaging effect to minimize the differentiation of "lines" of behavior and physical characteristics. Humans don't evolve like viruses, but they often behave like them. Culture can evolve, but that's not passed on via genetics but by learning. Think of different languages, beliefs, dress, sports, roles of men and women. Learning can be positive or negative. Take 1000 Russian babies out of Russia at 6 months and place them in a western nation and their behavior as adults will not be like the parents that produced them. If detrimental behaviors were inherited at birth, they would be eventually selected out of the gene pool. And there would no substance abuse, mass killings, or other crimes etc.. Unless we are ready to say there are no detrimental behaviors that affect the overall reproductive success of the species because their rate is low. In any event, good or bad behaviors are not determined at conception. That would be crossing over into eugenics. 

Edited May 18, 2023 by kevinkin

[dan/california]

 

Quote

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/us/politics/ukraine-spending-congress.html

Biden is using a rather brilliant accounting gimmick. If you write down the value of what has been sent, you can send more. What is a 27 year old artillery shell worth, anyway???

[kevinkin]

You should know:

Ammo is expensive, until it is Priceless.

10 minutes ago, dan/california said:

What is a 27 year old artillery shell worth, anyway???

 

[Centurian52]

I found this essay which gives some numbers for how much genetic variation there is within human populations vs between human populations. One caveat is that they are grouping human populations by continent, not by country.

Quote

Using a common definition that groups populations into major continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America), many studies have shown that approximately 90% of genetic variation can be found within these populations, and only about 10% of genetic variation separates the populations. Thus, the great majority of genetic differences can be found between individuals from any one of the major continents, and, on average, only a small proportion of additional differences will be found between individuals from two different continents.

https://www.ashg.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/genetic-variation-essay.pdf

[dan/california]

1 minute ago, kevinkin said:

You should know:

Ammo is expensive, until it is Priceless.

 

[Flibby]

I've been watching some interesting first hand accounts from British veterans of the conflict.

One thing they all recount that stands out to me, is lengthy shelling from the Russians over a period of days or weeks. Very little in the way of infantry attacks or combined arms assaults.

Is there such a failure in morale that the infantry fails to follow up the barrages, or have the ruskies forgotten post-1916 artillery doctrine, that you don't just shell an enemy and not try to get your own troops up behind the barrage?

[chrisl]

45 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Ohhhh for the days of Tank Ist Tot debates. 

*peers into the immediate future*

Think I'll give the next two pages a miss...

I think it’s time for a discussion of UGVs with tripod mounted Brens on them.

[dan/california]

 

Quote

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/opinion/ukraine-kyiv-missile-patriot.html

 

[Beleg85]

12 minutes ago, Flibby said:

I've been watching some interesting first hand accounts from British veterans of the conflict.

One thing they all recount that stands out to me, is lengthy shelling from the Russians over a period of days or weeks. Very little in the way of infantry attacks or combined arms assaults.

Is there such a failure in morale that the infantry fails to follow up the barrages, or have the ruskies forgotten post-1916 artillery doctrine, that you don't just shell an enemy and not try to get your own troops up behind the barrage?

They sometimes try to rush infantry, however while classical creeping barrages a la Seelow 1945 can happen, but are relatively rare (effective counterbattery post too much danger to own massed artillery). Defender's modern weapons (precision + range + recon) make difficult even reaching staging areas, much less attacking in force. Thus upgraded infiltration tactics supported by some armour seem like only way of going forward against entrenched enemy that brings some results.

Everything in this war seems much less concentrated than before.

[womble]

1 hour ago, dan/california said:

The selective pressure against free thinking liberalism in Russia has been extremely high 98% of the last thousand years. The degree it is out and genetic selection is probably unknowable, but either way that degree of pressure will get you less of it.  Putin allowing hundreds of thousands to leave the country to avoid the draft has also had political positives as well as massive economic negatives. The people who would have most vigorously opposed the regime left instead. There is a strong parallel with the survival of the Cuban government. The people who would have REALLY fought took the out to Miami.

So, a thousand years. That's what? 40 generations (at 25 years per generation)? 60 (if you assume reproduction by age 16)? Compare that with bacteria with a generation time of 20 minutes. 60 generations is 20 hours. How much evolution is there going to be for a colony of bacteria in a day? Not very much. The pressures in Russia on genetic makeup are very small, because behavioural changes are sufficient to permit survival to reproduction. We humans are fairly adaptable creatures, and I don't mean in the stupid comic-book interpretation of "evolution" either .

The territory covered by Russia has hardly been some monolithic autocracy for 10 centuries. It covers a very broad range of phenotypes, and has, in the past, included larger numbers of differentiated individuals. Only in the era of the Soviet Union was migration significantly restricted, either within the territory of what is now Russia, or in and out of it.

You've heard, I hope, of "regression to the mean". While those individuals who have sufficiently high combinations of resentment of the current situation and resources have absented themselves from the gene pool, those genes still remain to be expressed in the next generation.

"The degree to which it is out and out genetic selection" may not be precisely determinable, but it is unlikely to be significant.

[kevinkin]

2 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:

I found this essay

But do they write about how genetic variation affects variation in human behavior? No, because they can't. 

[chrisl]

17 minutes ago, womble said:

So, a thousand years. That's what? 40 generations (at 25 years per generation)? 60 (if you assume reproduction by age 16)? Compare that with bacteria with a generation time of 20 minutes. 60 generations is 20 hours. How much evolution is there going to be for a colony of bacteria in a day? Not very much. The pressures in Russia on genetic makeup are very small, because behavioural changes are sufficient to permit survival to reproduction. We humans are fairly adaptable creatures, and I don't mean in the stupid comic-book interpretation of "evolution" either .

The territory covered by Russia has hardly been some monolithic autocracy for 10 centuries. It covers a very broad range of phenotypes, and has, in the past, included larger numbers of differentiated individuals. Only in the era of the Soviet Union was migration significantly restricted, either within the territory of what is now Russia, or in and out of it.

You've heard, I hope, of "regression to the mean". While those individuals who have sufficiently high combinations of resentment of the current situation and resources have absented themselves from the gene pool, those genes still remain to be expressed in the next generation.

"The degree to which it is out and out genetic selection" may not be precisely determinable, but it is unlikely to be significant.

Antibiotic resistance to extremely high antibiotic levels in 11 days:

 

[Centurian52]

3 minutes ago, kevinkin said:

But do they write about how genetic variation affects variation in human behavior? No, because they can't. 

They don't. That essay is laser focused on genetics, and doesn't address behavior. But Steven Pinker's book How the Mind Works does address it. The TLDR is that genetic variation does affect variation in human behavior. Other human traits are influenced by genes, and it makes all the sense in the world that behavior would be among those traits. The studies he references come up with something like 50% of the variation in human behavior being accounted for by genes, with the other 50% being accounted for by the environment. Again though, that is variation within human populations, not between human populations. Differences in behavior between populations is almost entirely environmental. The reason is, as the essay I linked points out, that there is very little genetic variation between human populations. So environmental factors are the only thing that can account for behavioral differences between populations.

[MikeyD]

I'm reminded of how certain segments of the American ultra-wealthy like to consider themselves 'genetically superior' to the common rabble. Never mind how great-grandpa had been a prohibition rum-runner and mom is dad's second wife who used to work as a hotel masseuse. But they're definitely 'genetically superior'. Genetics doesn't work like that. 

[danfrodo]

3 hours ago, DesertFox said:

More good stuff:

 

 

This plays into my pet theory that UKR is quite content to do smaller stuff for May/June.  Corrosion, local attacks, misdirection, cause RU to panic & overreact (send reserves & get them stuck somewhere).  A FULL BRIGADE w LEO2s & CV90s!!!!!!   Even TheCapt has gotta think that's a serious asset!  Plus will look great in CMBS2.

Great posts y'all, I fell behind and had 6 pages to parse so had to skim some of the fun nature vs nuture content.  Now back to day job, dang it.

[dan/california]

25 minutes ago, chrisl said:

Antibiotic resistance to extremely high antibiotic levels in 11 days:

 

This is by the way one of the scariest movies ever made.

[chrisl]

3 minutes ago, dan/california said:

This is by the way one of the scariest movies ever made.

This may be one of the scariest things you’ll ever read: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024815118

[dan/california]

1 minute ago, chrisl said:

This may be one of the scariest things you’ll ever read: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024815118

Going for LLF's position as the forum's cheeriest member, are you?

[Harmon Rabb]

US signals to allies it won’t block their export of F-16 jets to Ukraine (CNN)

Free the falcons!

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours ago, Jiggathebauce said:

To try to add some comparison variety, Steve do you have much familiarity with Adorno and Horkheimer, and their analysis of the 'culture industry ' within the United States, particularly via hollywood and advertising? Dream factories, and so on? To sum up, the us has been socially engineering it's population for a long time to think of themselves as individuals, but only within a very narrow band that conforms to certain expectations. It's worth a browse in my opinion, I've only seen a few videos on the subject and can't expand much yet on it.

https://youtu.be/Z6F7oIlA9TE

 

False equivocation.  In the US if you don't want to watch a Marvel film you are not imprisoned, degraded, silenced, or murdered if you don't shut up or leave.

Cultures have never been, nor will ever be, without their influences.  Some good, some bad, some neither.  But there's a huge difference between a government actively engineers, through violence, its society and one that is more-or-less shaped by free market principles.  It's why things like objectification of women and "whites only" entertainment are not OK in the US any more.  The people have spoken and Hollywood has listened, not the other way around.  Which is exactly why the autocratic minded politicians in the US these days are trying to make things a lot more Russia like.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours ago, womble said:

I think that's where the geneticists would disagree. The gene pool won't hardly have a ripple in it, given the timescales involved. All that conditioning leaves marks on psyches, not DNA, not in centuries.

Over the last 100 years Soviet Union/Russia has murdered tens of millions and seen more than that leave with almost nobody new coming in.  Those that stayed in Soviet/Russia were the ones fitting a particular profile which, as I have already argued, has a biological component.  So I do think there is more than a ripple in the gene pool.

It is nearly impossible to prove what the impact of alcoholism, pollution, and unnatural selection, institutional serfdom, and other things have had on the gene pool, for example, because the data gathering would be insanely difficult to gather and there is no control group to compare against.

3 hours ago, womble said:

The difference, if you like, between Russia and the "Liberal West" is that in Russia, the crazies are the only societal element left that's allowed to speak, whereas in the West, both parties still get to voice their opinions, and the difference between "then" and "now" is that the Internet gives the crazies' voice a volume, connectedness and cohesion [chortle] it could never hope to achieve when media had actual sane people watching over it.

And because in Russia, "the only way is crazy", even people who would otherwise dismiss the nonsense have to get on board, to get ahead, and any human has the capacity to rationalise their self-interest as moral, in order to live with themselves, while only some have the fortitude to refuse to deceive/delude themselves.

It's much more complex than that, obviously, since there are different classes of crazy, from the sociopath-manipulator, to the violence-obsessed bully (none of which are entirely genetically determined; it's all "predispositions", and the system taps into those), and they all play their role in the dysfunctional "family" that Vova wants to be Patriarch of.

Correct.  As I said at the beginning, when I apparently kicked up this storm, is that biology only plays a part.  I wouldn't even say a huge part.  Social conditioning through classic non-biological methods is far more the issue.  Or at least I suspect it is. 

3 hours ago, womble said:

If the cause for the "Russian mentality" were genetic, you'd have to characterise German mid-20th-Century Nazism as similarly genetic, because the societal acquiescence to the rise of National Socialism has broad parallels in post-Soviet Russian Nationalism. I don't think anyone here believes that the German genetic makeup predisposes them to Nazism, indeed the empirical evidence would indicate very much otherwise. So why assume the Russian mentality is any more based in DNA than Hitler's was?

Because Russia has been at this for several hundred years without interruption.  Hitler had 12 years in total and only started down the extreme path rather late in the regime.  The Nazi's extreme response on its own people was focused on Jews and marginal members of society.  It also lost a good chunk of its fanatics as war casualties.

3 hours ago, womble said:

I'm sure there are analogies between the action of human biological inheritance, and the development of theories of Society (pace Ser Dawkins), but we should not confuse one with the other in its expression in populations.

Well, I for one am not   I simply made the point that if a society spends hundreds of years purging a specific group and rewards another group, the gene pool is going to change if there's no outside force (i.e. immigration) to counter it.  Toss in environmental disruptors to the otherwise natural biological determination of abilities and, well, you got yourself another variable to take into account.

Steve

[kevinkin]

2 hours ago, Centurian52 said:

Other human traits are influenced by genes, and it makes all the sense in the world that behavior would be among those traits.

So there is a gene for kindness, and no so kindness? And kind families pass on those genes to their offspring who become kind people? But being kind does not guarantee your genes will be passed on more than unkind people genes. There is no selective pressure on that behavioral trait. Even if they were, it would take hundreds of generations to effect a population. This timeframe is outside how long societies and their politics even exist. We have to separate physical and behavioral traits. Behaviors are learned and not inherited. Russians are not genetic misfits. They are not Home sapiens sapiens authoritative. The Russian culture has evolved, but, not locked into a child at birth. You would be hard pressed to differentiate the genomes of Germans and Japanese pre and post war. But their cultures and societies have changed a lot. This can't be natural selection given the timeframe. 

Edited May 19, 2023 by kevinkin

[dan/california]

29 minutes ago, Harmon Rabb said:

US signals to allies it won’t block their export of F-16 jets to Ukraine (CNN)

Free the falcons!

So since Europe seems to finally understand that the way to make it stop is to win the bleeping war, can we go one more step and stand up the Flying Tigers part 2? F-16s flying CAS over Southern Ukraine by August would just the thing to finish off Russian morale once and for all.

[akd]

Looks like the four Russian aircraft falling from the sky over Russia in the course of a few minutes was a Patriot ambush:

 

[kevinkin]

12 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

I simply made the point that if a society spends hundreds of years purging a specific group and rewards another group, the gene pool is going to change if there's no outside force (i.e. immigration) to counter it.

It won't in so few generations. And there is no selective genetic benefit on either the rewarded or unrewarded. Maybe the unrewarded don't have access to birth control and reproduce more. Maybe they die off because lack of healthcare. Maybe the rewarded inbreed. Maybe revolution wipes them out. Civilizations and their geostrategies are too short lived for natural selection affect their impact on the world. 

Edited May 19, 2023 by kevinkin